Can't Be Satisfied (66 page)

As crucial as a guitar is to defining a player’s sound, Muddy put the emphasis on the amplifier:

Margolin said, “Muddy ran his amps with all the knobs set on nine and no reverb or tremolo, controlling his volume from the guitar.” (Author interview with Bob Margolin.)

“Muddy loved that real trebly Telecaster sound,” said Johnny, “and he got a great sound out of his treble pickup. Sometimes during a verse, maybe just going into the
turnaround, [he] will switch the toggle from the bass or middle position to full treble and just let ’em have it. Muddy would tune his guitar to an E chord and put his capo wherever it needed
to go.

“You can’t exaggerate how distinctive Muddy’s playing is,” Johnny continued. “In my band, if I stop playing, the main feeling keeps on going, but when Muddy stops,
the whole feeling can change.” (Wheeler, “Waters–Winter.”)

“When I play on the stage with my band,” Muddy confirmed, “I have to get in there with my guitar and try to bring the sound down to me. But no sooner than I quit playing, it
goes back to another, different sound. My blues looks so simple, so easy to do, but it’s not. They say my blues is the hardest blues in the world to play.” (Palmer,
Deep
Blues
.)

249
“This is a big time for me tonight”: Random Notes,
Rolling Stone,
May 20, 1976.

250
“Johnny Winter”: Johnny Winter had made a lasting impression with Muddy when they’d met in 1968. “I told him
the truth then. ‘Man, you got to go places, because ain’t many white kids sounding like you at playing music.’ He’s albino white, he’s not
jiving
white, he
all
white!” (Wheeler, “Waters–Winter.”)

250
Muddy assembled a band: Muddy’s regular bassist, Calvin Jones, was indifferent about being excluded. “It didn’t
make me no difference. It didn’t make me a bit of difference.” It also wouldn’t have made a drastic difference to his pocketbook, and recognition didn’t buy cans of
food.

251
“the greatest Saturday-night drummer alive”: Author interview with Scott Cameron.

251
“Every country has its own music”: Palmer,
Deep Blues,
p. 104.

252
“What I really wanted to do as a producer”: von Lehmden, “Muddy Waters’ Winter of Content,” p. 28.

253
Muddy waltzed across the globe: He opened a string of dates for Bonnie Raitt
in the Pacific Northwest.
“By the mid–nineteen seventies, Bonnie wanted opening acts of people whose music she really loved,” said Dick Waterman, her longtime manager. “She wanted to come to the gig
and sit and listen to Fred McDowell or Sippie Wallace. She was initially uncomfortable with having Muddy Waters open for her. She said, ‘This should not be.’ We won her over by
explaining he was being paid all the money that he was asking, and we were giving him visibility and a bigger crowd. Instead of a club, he’s playing for three thousand five hundred and
getting better sound and lights. And Bonnie would say on her set, ‘I can’t tell you how honored I am to have this artist on this show with me.’ ” The arrangement worked and
was repeated several times in different locales.

255
the manager got the rest: Even as Muddy leaned on Scott, he was concerned about the support’s strength. On a trip to Mexico
City, Muddy had asked Willie Dixon — also signed with Cameron — and Dixon’s wife, Marie, to his room. “He said, ‘I have some suspicions about Scott,’ ”
Marie Dixon recalled. The discussion was vague. Later, Dixon developed his own suspicions, which led to severing his relationship with the Cameron Organization. “When my husband decided to
fight Arc Music,” said Marie Dixon, “his intention was to become owner of his songs. He looked at his contract with Scott, and it gave Scott one-third ownership of the songs for the
life of the songs. I was standing in my living room when he told Scott Cameron, ‘I wrote these songs for myself and my family and not for anyone else and their families.’ He
didn’t mind paying a manager to manage his business, but when it came to giving a third of what was his, it infuriated him.”

256
“I got a band and they’re on vacation”: von Lehmden, “Muddy Waters’ Winter of Content,” p.
28.

258
“They wanted me and my band”:
Sweet Home Chicago,
produced by Nina Rosenstein, directed by Alan Raymond.

258
“Muddy Waters is one of the great performers”: Obrecht, “Life and Times.”

259
“Eric Clapton”: In Minneapolis, on the Clapton tour, arrangements were made for Muddy’s former guitarist, Pat Hare,
to surprise his old boss with a visit. Hare had kept up his chops in prison. Accompanied by an armed guard, Hare enjoyed Muddy’s set from the side of the stage. At the encore, “Got My
Mojo Working,” Margolin loaned Hare his axe and the pair reunited for a last time. Pat Hare died in St. Paul’s Ramsey Hospital on September 26, 1980, a day after learning he was to
receive a medical pardon. (Hahn, “Pat Hare.”)

260
Muddy married Marva Jean Brooks: Muddy had a favorite produce store on the South Side, Seventy-first and State Streets. “He
always thought they had the freshest greens and the nicest cuts of meat,” Cameron said. “Then Willie Dixon turned us on to a place at the state line between Illinois and Indiana where a
woman grew corn-fed beef and you’d buy a quarter or a half a cow, they’d cut it up the way you wanted and then freeze it, you’d take it home to your freezer.”

261
“contract rider”: In addition to money, some of the other stipulations of Muddy’s contract were a deli tray for
twelve people, beer, soft drinks, Perrier, ice, cups, and sugar-free soft drinks.

262
“The uncomfortable business situation”: Author interview with Bob Margolin.

264
new band: Jesse Clay was the first drummer, briefly. Rogers’s role was never intended to be more than temporary. “But
Scott wanted it to be a permanent thing and he put it in the
Jet
that we were back together again,” Rogers said, “and that was wrong. I was just doing Muddy a favor. Muddy
meant a lot to me.”

265
“It was hard to believe”: Stephen Holden,
New York Times,
April 1, 1981. (Actually sixty-eight years old.)

265
When the Rolling Stones next returned to Chicago: “I was living down the street from [Muddy],” said Cookie, “and he
called me to say he was cooking wine chicken. We all thought he could cook it really good, and he said one of the Rolling Stones [Keith Richards] was over and for me to come.” Here’s
his wine chicken recipe, with thanks to the official Muddy Web page, www.muddywaters.com:

15: T
HIS
D
IRT
H
AS
M
EANING
1983 and After

Funeral, Friends, Tributes:
“I hate that Muddy wasn’t a storyteller no more than bits and pieces,” Cookie said. “If you said to Muddy,
‘Where’s your mom?’ He’d
say, ‘She died.’ And that was it. Muddy never opened up. I know he loved his grandmother, he told me that several
times. When I got older, I tried that psychology bit, saying to him one time, ‘You must really didn’t do well with the death of your mother and then your grandmother,’ I said,
‘and I know how you felt because my mother died when I was young.’ And he’s giving me that look like, ‘Who the hell do you think
you
are?’ And I said,
‘You know I always regretted that you never had pictures, you never had anything to say this is who that is,’ and he said, ‘Well it was just something we couldn’t afford,
pictures, and it was just something we did.’ And we left it like that because I could see it was touchy.”

Before the funeral service on Wednesday evening, May 4, Muddy’s family and close friends were gathered in the small room where Muddy was laid out. Margolin passed by an old gentleman who
was seated in the corner. “He asked me, ‘Did you even
know
Muddy?’ I ignored his attitude and replied that I had played in his band. He trumped me. ‘Well, I knew
him in
Mississippi,
’ but then he noticed George Thorogood standing nearby and he got very excited and asked, ‘Isn’t that Mick Jagger?’ ”

Seven of Muddy’s children were mentioned in his funeral program: Joseph, Mercy, Renee, Roslind, Charles (Geneva’s son), Deltwaine (Marva’s son), and Larry. No one I spoke with,
including Muddy’s estate, could identify “Larry” (Laurence, Muddy’s grandson, was mentioned elsewhere in the program) nor could anyone identify “Poppa.” How many
children did Muddy have? Here’s one answer: he and Geneva raised three — Charles, Dennis, and Amelia. I count six blood children — Azelene, Bill, Mercy, Joseph, Renee, and
Roslind.

“The worst thing to happen to my family was when my father died,” Joseph said. “We didn’t have that backbone no more to put some weight on. Before he died, I signed my
basketball scholarship on April 13. Coming back after my first year of college, [Muddy’s last wife] Marva decided to move back to Florida, and she’s taking Roslind with her, and Renee
got married to some guy, she was moving. I didn’t see Mercy much. Those first five years, I kind of clung to Cookie, because it was a base. But I’ve seen everything change. Gangs was in
my house and in my neighborhood. If my father wouldn’t have moved me out of that house, I would have been a Blackstone Ranger for real. Definitely a Stone. I probably would be dead or in
prison. So in a sense he saved my life actually.” Being Muddy’s heir has not been easy for him. “Some people try to become your friends, but they’re not being honest. Even
dating girls, I was proud to let everybody know who my father is. Now I don’t tell no one, because it’s for the wrong reasons. I learned that the hard way.”

Junior Wells credited Muddy with his success. “Muddy showed me how to carry myself around people and to remember that didn’t nobody owe me nothin’ and knowin’ not to get
the big head or anything like that,” Wells told
Living Blues.
(O’Neal and van Singel, “Muddy Waters,” pp. 16–17.) “He told me it could take sometime
years to get a thing to go for yourself and then sometime you could get it quicker than that and then lose the same thing overnight. He’d say, ‘Always remember, whatever you do, do not
disrespect the public.’ ” My own experience with Junior was a bit different. When I saw him on a small stage in the 1980s, he was touring with a sizable band and playing James
Brown–styled funk. He was doing
two shows that evening. At the first, he fired his trombone player on stage, hitting him in the jaw; then he called the sound man a
“fat fuck.” I didn’t stick around to hear how the second set sounded.

“I have a guitar that Muddy gave me, an old Stella,” Jimmy Rogers told me. “It was down in his basement and the neck was broken so I had it fixed. And after the funeral I
looked at that guitar and the neck was broken where I had it fixed.” When Jimmy died, he was working on an album for Atlantic Records, released after his death with the title
Blues Blues
Blues.
On it, Rogers juggles the baton with some old friends — Clapton, members of the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin — and passes it to Jeff Healey and other relative newcomers.
Perhaps most importantly, before he died, Rogers saw the blues pay off and he was able to enjoy his life. “When I’m goin’ after a fish, I don’t care how big he is,
I’ll keep at it. I go to different places around in Illinois, places where I usually have a chance to run out there for three or four hours. I fish for cats, crappies, bass, and stuff like
that. . . . And Dorothy [his wife] hangs right there with me.”

After Muddy’s death, Bob Margolin gave back some of what he’d learned, befriending Muddy’s son Big Bill Morganfield and coproducing Bill’s first album. They often tour
together. “It seems like interest in Muddy is very much alive these days,” Margolin said. “Bill and I did lots of interviews and there were as many questions about Muddy as about
us. It’s a tribute to Muddy’s power that people are still trying to get in touch with Muddy through us.”